We here at The Covington News strive to be your go-to source for what’s happening around Newton County.

In any given week, you’ll find at least twice as many stories and photos about local life and what’s going on here than anywhere else.

Over the holidays, from our combined editions for Christmas through our combined editions for New Years, we served up 146 stories and 113 images in three issues. We gave you breaking news such as a truck wreck that blocked I-20, and we gave you drawings and stories from local children on how Santa works his magic.

Check us out at Covnews.com, where we post breaking news, and you’ll find things out first. You can even sign up for alerts to your e-mail so you can always find out what you need to know when you need to know it.

We’re the local news source, and our community is Newton County. This is who we are, and what we do. There are six of us here in the newsroom. We live here, we work here, and we’re dedicated to gathering and delivering news here.

Whether it’s in print or online, it costs money to deliver all this content and expertise, and we think we give you a lot of value for your hard-earned money. We’ve been giving this content to you for free online, but we recently asked you to register before you peruse our reports. Your registration helps us get a better idea of who is using our content. This helps us get a better idea of who our consumers are and what they want, and that helps us both fine tune our content and show our advertisers who they are reaching.

But it’s set off a conversation among our Facebook friends who are perturbed about the registration process.

Sorry for the bother, but really, it just takes a few minutes of your time (I registered in less than three minutes for access to our sister site, rockdalenews.com).

It’s well worth a few moments of effort to access top-notch news coverage and to stay in the know.

 Rabbit is rich(er): Last week I told y’all about how I try to say ‘rabbit’ first thing on the first of the month for good luck. Donna and I managed to say it first thing for New Year’s and ate our share of greens and black-eyed peas, too. I don’t know if it’s coincidence or not, but I got $30 in scratch-off Georgia Lottery tickets that morning and now have $60 in winnings. Yes, I realize, as a former co-worker said, that playing the lottery is a self-imposed tax on stupidity, but we look on it as doing our patriotic duty and helping out Georgia schools.